Exporting and plotting GPS coordinates from cell phone photos

Recently I was interested in seeing all the places I’ve taken photos and found a way of extracting exif data (specifically lat/long) from images stored on my cell phone. Here are the steps I used.

Generate the CSV file

To begin, start by installing exiftool. This can done on OS X by running “brew install exiftool” (assuming you have Homebrew installed).

The following will generate a CSV file (photogps.csv) from jpg images containing the name of the file, GPS lat, and GPS long.

exiftool -csv -c "%+.6f" -gpslatitude -gpslongitude -T *.jpg | grep -v "\-," > photogps.csv

Plot the file

To plot the file, use Google Fusion tables. Visit:

Google Fusion Tables

To create the map, do the following:

1. Import the CSV file (leave comma separated, UTF-8 character encoding, column names in row 1).
2. Under the column header for GPSLatitude, mouse over and pull down the dropdown that appears, select Change…
3. Change type on GPSLatitude to Location. Select Two Column Location and save.
4. Click the red + button to add a map.